To be successful in today's economy, companies must have fast access to various sources of information. It is critical for an enterprise to be able to extract, transform, move, stage, and present key information across all points of the enterprise. This may require consolidating different types of information from multiple back-end systems and analyzing that data over a networked environment, such as the Internet. Typically, providing information over the World-Wide Web (herein after “the web”) is a costly and time-consuming effort, and the results are rarely optimized for the Internet.
Existing tools do not allow much flexibility in transforming various kinds of information into customized result sets (e.g., charts, spreadsheets, reports, etc.). For example, a report created for one user is typically used by this specific user only. Other user requests for a similar report are processed anew. In addition, formation of the report, including grouping and pagination of report records, is typically performed on a client machine, thereby increasing the amount of data being sent to the client machine and delaying the delivery of the report to the user.
Furthermore, when a page of a result set contains a value that cannot be computed until subsequent pages are processed, this page is not built until the value is computed. For example, if a first report page contains a grand total which cannot be computed until the entire report is built, the user does not see the first report page until all the report pages are created. It is not uncommon for an enterprise report to include more than 1,000 pages. For a report of such length, the waiting time may be significant and may seriously affect the speed of delivering the report to the user.
Therefore, what is needed is a data processing tool which enables rapid creation and distribution of customized result sets to the users.